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It would be great if a team that sucked last year decided 'what the heck' and tried it. Seattle would be good - that'd scare a few teams seeing Felix Hernandez twice in a 4 game series. Or howsabout Colorado where the air is thin and pitchers need every stress relief they can get? Last year Colorado had 14 pitchers start a game (9 with 10+ starts) and just one cracked 100 for ERA+ - gotta try something new and see what happens, how much worse could it get?

Edit: Colorado also had its top 6 relievers with 100+ ERA+'s - so no harm done using them more one would think.

Colorado has done some experimentation. They went with a 4 man rotation and restricted pitch counts for a good while last year.

They had 22 starts on 3 days rest. ERA during those starts was 5.49, with a 2.13 K/W. Overall their starters had a 5.81 ERA and 1.79 K/W, so there was some success. Not sure how it looks if you control by pitcher.

You might be able to try a variant of James's proposal using tandem starters (which used to be done in the low minors a lot, although not so much any more). If you have 12 pitchers, you designate six as tandem starters who would throw, say, 75 pitches each every third game, and then use the remaining six like you use the rest of your bullpen today.

I've often thought that at some point a manager might put strict limits on his starters and designate one of his relievers as his "winner"--the guy who would go in to pitch the fifth inning any time his team is ahead after four.

I think it would be a very stupid way to go--but I think someone might try it sometime, and some pitcher will start picking up a lot of easy wins the way closers pick up easy saves.

The single-season and career wins records might not seem so untouchable then.

The single-season and career wins records might not seem so untouchable then.

The single-season record is 59. You could probably beat this if your goal was simply to beat this, by putting in a reliever for the 5th every time you are ahead and then yanking him after an inning. 80 appearances in that scenario would eventually get someone 60 wins.

But why in the hell would anyone do that? If you're yanking a guy after 4 on a regular basis then you're probably at an average pitch total of about 70. The only way that works is if you are doing the tandem starters thing Mike suggests above, or something similar that involves relievers who go multiple innings. Not 4 innings from the starter followed by 5 relievers. You can't plan on your designated winner going several innings in each appearance -- what if you are winning in the 4th 5 days in a row? Also, if you're not limiting guys to 4 innings but only pulling guys who are ahead, then you are generally going to be pulling pitchers who are doing well earlier than you would pull pitchers who aren't doing well. Which makes no sense under any system.

That said, it would be fun to try this in Diamond Mind or Strat or OOTP.

EDIT: The fun thing would be when a team with a good offense (or one playing in Coors) tries something weird like 4 inning starts and has a scrubby mopup guy who comes in when they are behind by X number of runs. He has no opportunity to lose games, but can win ones where his team scores a lot late. Guys like this would be the worst pitcher on the team and yet constantly put up records of 4-0 or 6-0, with the occasional 13-0 fluke thrown in. It might finally kill pitching wins as a valued statistic.

I've often thought that at some point a manager might put strict limits on his starters and designate one of his relievers as his "winner"--the guy who would go in to pitch the fifth inning any time his team is ahead after four.

I think it would be a very stupid way to go--but I think someone might try it sometime, and some pitcher will start picking up a lot of easy wins the way closers pick up easy saves.

The single-season and career wins records might not seem so untouchable then.

When the starting pitcher is the pitcher of record, but does not go five innings, the win does not necessarily go to the fifth-inning pitcher, but to the pitcher the scorer determines to have been the most effective. (See Rule 10.17b). A manager might be able to manipulate a few wins for a pitcher, but not major quantities.

particularly the “square of pitches thrown,” an arbitrary construct to measure “stress” that could be replaced by several other approaches; and the notion that the most stressful pitches occur when a pitcher is tired, a notion that is mere common sense.

And all those other approaches would be arbitrary as well. Sure, athletes are more susceptible to injury when tired, but tired comes to everyone differently which is going to break any one size fits all metric. I know we'd all like a number to check on Fangraphs of which pitchers are going to break soon but there just too many variables and too many unknowns. We are never going to get there.

The smartest organizations are not going to pour a bunch of resources into this unsolvable problem, but will instead focus on getting as many useful arms as possible, being responsible but not militant about workload and hoping for the best.

I've often thought that at some point a manager might put strict limits on his starters and designate one of his relievers as his "winner"--the guy who would go in to pitch the fifth inning any time his team is ahead after four.

I think it would be a very stupid way to go--but I think someone might try it sometime, and some pitcher will start picking up a lot of easy wins the way closers pick up easy saves.

Years ago when I had more time on my hands I played a minor league season to go along with the APBA league I run. With one of the top pitching prospects, we didn't really care about watching him put up innings or pitch in normal situations (he was something like a 14 XYZ and pretty much guaranteed to be the #1 overall pick no matter what he did) and just felt like seeing how many wins he could get. I think he went 31-2 or something like that. Should have been more greedy, could have gone after Old Hoss, but 30 wins seemed like a good enough goal.

The only real problem is can see with Don's suggestion is that it may be hard to talk your good pitchers into starting, because they won't be pitching 5 innings, and so can't get a win. I did only one interview when I had a press pass, but it was with Tony LaRussa, and that was the exact question I asked - Why did you give up on your 3-pitchers 3-IP each plan. He said that he had to abandon the plan because no one wanted to negotiate a contract after an 0-12 won/lost record, no matter how low his ERA was or how well the team did. That is, no one was willing to start. - Brock Hanke

Throwing is not dangerous to a pitcher's arm. Throwing while tired is dangerous to a pitcher's arm.

The move to a five-man rotation is simply not based on hard medical evidence.

I am confident that the organization that is willing to return to the four-man rotation, in conjunction with strictly monitoring their starters' pitch counts, will gain tangible benefits without increased risk to their pitchers.

We have already seen at least one influential baseball man, Grady Fuson, take a different tack. In order to get his charges as much work as possible while keeping them healthy, Fuson has experimented with a modified version of the four-man rotation. In his system, eight pitchers are split into four pairs, working every fourth game, with one member of the pair starting, and the other relieving after the starter has reached a very conservative pitch limit, somewhere around 80 pitches. The two pitchers then switch places the next time through the rotation. Two or three pitchers are made permanent relievers to fill in the gaps along the way.

Fuson has hit upon something very important: based on the existing research, it seems safer to allow young pitchers to work on less rest than to allow them to throw 110 or more pitches in a game. The organization that decides to switch to a four-man rotation can start at the minor league level, either by using the Fuson formula or simply going with the traditional four-man rotation, as long as those starters are placed on very strict pitch counts.

At some point in the next five years, I am confident that we will see the return of the four-man rotation.

The four-man rotation is poised to make a comeback. As far as I'm concerned, it can't come back soon enough.

But why in the hell would anyone do that? If you're yanking a guy after 4 on a regular basis then you're probably at an average pitch total of about 70. The only way that works is if you are doing the tandem starters thing Mike suggests above, or something similar that involves relievers who go multiple innings.

Colorado was doing that for part of last year. The pitch limit was 75. On a good start, a guy would get through 5, but since they had bad starters, 3 or 4 innings was common. For a while they were mainly rotating 3 relievers after the starter (Adam Ottavino, Josh Roenicke, and Carlos Torres); those guys went a couple innings.

Bill James' suggestion of a three-man rotation and a strict pitch limit is not new for him. He made the exact same suggestion in the Don Sutton comment of the New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract published in 2001, I believe. The context was a discussion of the five-man rotation, with Sutton being probably the first "great" pitcher to pitch most of his career in, and benefit from, a five-man rotation.

When the starting pitcher is the pitcher of record, but does not go five innings, the win does not necessarily go to the fifth-inning pitcher, but to the pitcher the scorer determines to have been the most effective. (See Rule 10.17b). A manager might be able to manipulate a few wins for a pitcher, but not major quantities.

But in practice, the win almost always goes to the guy who pitches the fifth inning.

At some point in the next five years, I am confident that we will see the return of the four-man rotation.

Of course, Rany wrote that 10 years ago. Predicting is hard, especially the future.

For many years, pitching injuries have been the hill that sabermetricians have died on. It seems so intuitive that limiting pitch counts will reduce injuries, but there's remarkably little evidence that it does, or will. Before we radically change pitching usage patterns, it would be nice to see one study that finds a real effect in terms of reducing injuries or increasing effectiveness.

@21: A very small population, with very different abilities and physiques, much of which does not lend itself to conclusive analysis; oh, and each of whom does the thing a little bit differently, in subtly different environments, with vastly differing coaching and training and regimens and treatments, and with a self-selection process of sorts behind it all...

If you're going to go to a rotation where everybody throws 75 pitches every three days, it'd better be resolvable.

Back in the days when PAP was invented, it was reasonable to think that the approach would turn up something. You track the league leaders in long outings, figure out some reasonable proxy for effectiveness, and there you are. But the big discovery of the PAP era is that it is more complicated than that. Simple pitch counts don't work, and don't tell you which pitchers are likely to get injured.

It's ironic. People really badly wanted to make a positive change by discovering a way to avoid injuries. But the way it worked out, what they actually discovered is that their favored solution doesn't work. Instead of promoting their actual discovery, they kept on promoting pitch counts and reductions in workloads.

Out of curiosity I had OOTP run the 2010 Yankees with a 3 man rotation and a 75-pitch limit but otherwise normal bullpen management. The team went 105-57 (and Curtis Granderson won the MVP). The winningest pitcher was Mark Melancon with 13. 8 guys won 9 or more. I imagine that's the sort of pattern you'd see from a good team with a low pitch limit.

(The computer traded Sabathia for Nick Markakis and a minor leaguer, which is why he got so few starts.)

@24: Fascinating--so, you ran the numbers for a starter who pitched, say, 110 pitches, but credited him with the results only through his first 75 pitches, then...?

How did you fill in the 'blank', if you know what I mean, i.e. the 35 pitches he didn't throw in your 75 maximum scenario?

I wonder how many middle relievers, many of whom are converted starters, could excel in a '75-pitch maximum' role. I have no idea how one might project that, or if it's at all possible. It might greatly expand your pool of starters, though.

@24: Fascinating--so, you ran the numbers for a starter who pitched, say, 110 pitches, but credited him with the results only through his first 75 pitches, then...?

No, I just set the computer manager run a strict 3-man rotation and to pull the starter after 75 pitches. (To be clear, this was a video game simulation of the season, not something based on actual events.)

In the game player's names turn yellow when they are tired, and every time I stopped the sim to take a look it seemed that most of the pitching staff had turned yellow. This is just computer baseball so that doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it does suggest that you can't just have three starters and then use the other 8-9 pitchers like normal relievers.

I was impressed that Vazquez could throw 200 innings and Burnett get 12 wins with the low pitch limit.

Thanks for the clarification. Do you recall offhand how often 75 pitches allowed a pitcher to complete 5 innings? (I think that as much as anything would be a sticking point, that no one wants to sign with a team that will suppress his win total.)

edit: a pitcher throwing 200 innings is facing, what, around 900 batters? Throwing 3500 pitches? Divide that by 75 and you'd need around 47 starts to get there. That assumes your guy isn't knocked out of the box early.

Basically our starters would be dropping 1.5 innings per start and this only works if your former 4 & 5 starters can eat up those 7.5 innings every 5 days. In that sense, it's saving you about 3.5 innings per 5 games from your 4 & 5 starters but, as your IP totals show, those extra innings go to other relievers, not the top 3 starters.

Look at those reliever IP totals. Rivera near 100, Melancon near 100, Aceves (with 3 starts) over 100, Park over 90 in 80 appearances. In 2012, no relievers made it to 90 innings and only 5 made it to 80.

The James model, or any pitcher usage that further reduces IP/start, requires either more relief slots or more long relievers. The old 4th and 5th starters have to throw about 120 innings of relief each (assuming no injuries). Of course the pitchers don't have to be your actual 4th and 5th starters. Anyway, a strict 75-pitch limit increases reliever load by about 240 innings a year; in current usage, that is about 3.5 more reliever slots requiring a 13.5 man staff. That leaves you with a backup C, a backup SS, a backup CF and Brooks Kieshnick.

Meanwhile, can relievers handle 100 IP a year loads? P-I is not perfect for this sort of thing, but requiring 95% of games are in relief (even a couple of starts can really throw this off) and limiting to the expansion era:

There have been 427 such seasons.
Only one of these seasons has occurred since 1999, only another 21 in the 90s.

Now, fair enough, some guys could do it in the 70s ... but it's just 16 of them spread across 30 years of baseball. Of course they only pitched 100+ because, in some sense, they had to, maybe a lot of guys could have done it if their team wanted them to.

But, if you want to talk about risk, put it simply this way ... James is proposing that the bullpen pitch half of all the innings in a season. No team has ever come close to that. There is zero evidence that relievers can handle that sort of load and no evidence you could pull it off without a 14-man staff.

Cutting back to a 3- or 4-man rotation does pretty much absolutely nothing if it requires you to roughly maintain the total number of innings each of those individual pitchers pitches.

In one model, Vazquez pitches 200 and another two guys pitch 180 each and two guys pitch 150 each. In the other model, Vazquez pitches 200 (in 50 starts), another two guys pitch 180 (in 50 starts), and you've still got to fill in those 300 innings no longer pitched by your #4-5 starters. How can you do that without expanding your pitching staff? Well, the easiest thing to try would be to have your #4 and #5 starters still throw 150 each, only in relief and those 12 missing starts. How does that help? Alternatively you give them about 120 each and spread the remaining 60 innings among your 7 "regular reliever" slots. OK, that seems not overly burdensome but all you've accomplished is giving about half of those 60 innings to your crappy relievers but, still, you've moved about 30 of them to your good relievers.

Just how much is 30 innings of 110 ERA+ pitching vs. 90 ERA+ pitching worth? One win, maybe two wins if it helps you optimize higher-leverage usage? Is that worth the huge risk of completely revamping your pitcher usage and possibly putting your best starters and your best relievers at greater risk?

Of course, Rany wrote that 10 years ago. Predicting is hard, especially the future.

In case it wasn't clear, I posted those not as evidence of Rany's brilliance but as counter-evidence to Don's claim that the idea of cutting back on the rotation size was "so different from what was being bandied about in those early years of hysteria" and that, of course, it was beyond the imaginations of those idiots at BPro.

The King of PAP himself was basically proposing the same thing as James AND was trying to back it up with data over 10 years ago. Once again Don let his anti-BPro blinders get in the way of actual facts.

Moreover, we have discussed this and related ideas here every year the site has been in existence I'd bet. I shudder to think how many times I've posted a variant of #28. There was nothing innovative in James's off-the-cuff idea.

Simple pitch counts don't work, and don't tell you which pitchers are likely to get injured.

Of course by the time PAP came along, every team in baseball was using the 5-man rotation and was strictly enforcing pitch counts on everybody but Randy Johnson, Livan Hernandez and the 2003 Cubs. Those were decisions made by wizened old baseball men not number crunchers. Had some variant of PAP been around in the 60s when young pitchers were throwing 280 innings and frequently coming up lame, they might have found a stronger relationship ... or nothing at all.

This wasn't a gradual change, this was every team in baseball deciding to change during the 2000-01 offseason. (OK, maybe half the teams got rid of them entirely.) PAP was introduced in 1998. BPro never had that sort of influence. Carrying forward:

I'm not sure who other than the A's would have counted as a "sabermetric" team in 2001. They did have only 5 qualifying starts, below league average. But that league average is pulled up just a tad by ...

Arizona: 22 (15 Unit, 7 Schilling)

Giants with 15 (Livan), Yankees with 14 and Cleveland (Colon with a bit of CC) with 13 were next. I think those were the only ones over 9. Unit, Livan and Colon account for about 15% of the qualifying starts. In 2001, only those 3 pitchers had 10+ such starts and only Schilling also had 7+; in 2000, 7 had 10+ and 17 had 7+.

Out of curiosity I had OOTP run the 2010 Yankees with a 3 man rotation and a 75-pitch limit but otherwise normal bullpen management. The team went 105-57 (and Curtis Granderson won the MVP). The winningest pitcher was Mark Melancon with 13. 8 guys won 9 or more. I imagine that's the sort of pattern you'd see from a good team with a low pitch limit.

Perhaps not too relevant, but this reminded me of something I discovered a couple years ago. In baseball history, there is one team that had seven pitchers with 11+ wins: the 1976 Reds. Of course, this was driven by one of the greatest starting lineups of all time. But, perhaps they're, in some ways, a good case study.

The fact is, the Reds of the Sparky Anderson era couldn't keep any pitcher healthy for long, mainly due to abusing every good arm that came along.

--In 1976, Gary Nolan was the only pitcher in the rotation for the whole year. And that was basically the end of his career.
--Don Gullett was the veteran ace, 25-years-old and in his 7th year. He started the season on the DL and was off and on it most of the year. Finally back to stay on August 30, he went on to make two excellent postseason starts.
--Pat Zachry's 128 ERA+ was the best among Reds starters and he became the ROY at age 24. He entered the rotation on May 9th and started a few times on two or three days rest. He never again had a season as good.
--Jack Billingham had been the Reds workhorse since 1972, but now was wearing down, missing several starts in mid-season while compiling an 81 ERA+. He did not start in the postseason.
--Fred Norman was a journeyman lefty who had been with the Reds since 1973. He joined the rotation for good on June 22nd and was solid the rest of the year.
--Santo Alcala was a 23-year-old rookie who wasn't much of a prospect. He filled the back end of the rotation for most of the year, lucky to have the Big Red Machine supporting him.
--Rawly Eastwick was their brilliant 25-year-old closer. He led the NL in saves his first two full years (1975-76) while being used like there was no tomorrow. For Rawly this turned out to be the case, basically. Four times in 1976 he pitched three days in a row, pitching 107.2 IP with 59 GF. He had nothing left by the 1976 postseason. He saved only 18 games in the rest of his career.